The present invention relates generally to vehicle doors and more particularly to the glass attachment for a movable window in a vehicle door.
Automotive vehicles typically include movable window glass in some or all of the vehicle side windows. For vehicle doors with movable window glass, the interiors of the doors include two separate assemblies. A first assembly, a glass run channel assembly, is mounted adjacent to the front and rear edges of the door. The run channel assembly directs the window glass in the fore-aft and inboard-outboard directions. A second assembly, a window regulator assembly, is spaced from the channel assembly more toward the middle of the door. The window regulator assembly is used to move the window glass up and down. The window regulator assembly typically includes a pair of guide rails, upon which sliders are mounted and guided. Typically, these two assemblies can be installed separately, with the window glass thereafter slid into the run channel assemblies and secured to the sliders in some way.
The window glass has been secured to the sliders in various ways, including mounting a regulator carrier plate to slide along the guide rails and bolting this plate to clips bonded on the window glass. Another attachment method includes using a clamping mechanism with an elastomeric insulator that is squeezed against the window glass, with the clamping mechanism being attached to the window regulator. Still others have employed a combination slider and carrier with a screw or bolt driven into a plastic clip that is snapped into a hole in the glass. All of these approaches generally have drawbacks in that they require more assembly time and/or cost more than is desirable.
A convenient way to assemble a window glass to a window regulator assembly may be particularly desirable for vehicle doors having movable window glass where the glass run channel assembly and the window regulator assembly are combined into a single assembly. Some have proposed combining the glass run channels and the window regulator assembly into one subassembly. However, the proposed solutions, while combining these components, tend to make installation of the window glass and connection to the window regulator more difficult. Consequently, for these types of configurations, while they have some advantages over conventional separate assemblies, they also have the potential to make assembling the window glass into this assembly more cumbersome and difficult—thus negating some of the advantage in combining the assemblies in the first place.